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Sunday, May 07, 2006

Sunday Morning Comin' Down

In some ways, blogging about football is so much easier than blogging consistently about baseball. With football, you have one day, sixty minutes of information, and 6 times the time to process it. With baseball, it's information overload, and sometimes I feel I can't do justice to it.

Especially with this team. I feel like I have a handle on them one day, and the next they throw me a backdoor curve, (to use a football metaphor) give me a new look. And I'm flat on my ass again.

I mean, Wednesday, the offense went off the way we've all been hoping they would. Against Roy Halladay, what's more. With the way things have been going, you'd think we win that game hands down.

Nope. Because, whattaya know, the pitching staff chooses exactly that moment to hide under the bed. It was collective, the negative mojo extending even to our Boy Wonder, giving up his first ER of the year.

A game which you left cowering, shaken, unsure in what exactly this team was about.

And yet, going to Fenway the very next evening ( many many thanks to fellow blogger Twitch for the ticket), it looked like a whole new team. The offense again finally clicked, putting up 5 runs before we even knew what was going on. And, I can personally vouch, the rumors of Mike Lowell's demise have been greatly exaggerated. No one's Billy Mueller, but Mikey is doing his damnedest to quickly build up his own legend. My mother told me I would like him, and as usual, she was not far off from the truth.

And Youk.....ah, Youk. He does everything, and more. Best leadoff OBP in the league, and oh yeah, he can occasionally pop one out too.

My favorite part: personally experiencing the delicious tension of "Will or won't Manny make back out of the wall in time for the start of the inning?" Brilliant.

And while, the bullpen was again a little shaky, ( including the DEPRESSINGLY PREDICTABLE SUCK OF RUDY SEANEZ), Matty stepped up to the plate, taking a one-hitter into the 6th. The only truly scary moment was the trainers exiting the dugout en masse to check on Jon Boy, after a pitch to Vernon Wells. The people watching TV, and the people sitting in the field box seats, might have known what was going on, but to those of us back in the grandstand, it was a complete mystery, of the scariest kind.

We lost Wednesday, we won Thursday, and the same team looked so so different. Bipolar, even. And with Lenny the Other White Boy pitching this afternoon, there is an equal chance of briliance or darkness in this same team body. A highly stressful, highly enjoyable train ride, that's what this team has become. With all of us strapped into the seats.

******

Speaking of the collective "us", go visit Beth's for the Official Story of Iain's Visit to Boston( with Pictures!). Part of which was a supremely awesome Get-Together of the Sox Blogging/Grady Survival Peeps at Crossroads, in Kenmore Square, which I was lucky to be a part of. A bunch of crazy, hilarious and lovely people+ good food and beer= best Saturday afternoon ever.